BACKGROUND
Taylors of Harrogate is one of the country’s leading independent tea and coffee merchants. As well as buying and packaging a range of specialty teas and coffees, the family business also blends Yorkshire Tea. Prior to commencing the project, Taylors of Harrogate’s current server estate and NAS solution was nearly five years old and showing signs of its age in terms of capacity and performance. It was time to consider the options for upgrade/replacement of these servers. Rather than replacing the servers with the current equivalent, Taylors engaged SICL to work with them on the latest technologies and suitable solutions to fit their business requirements and future growth plans.
SOLUTION
Following completion of a pre-planning phase a solution design and migration plan was completed. The solution was designed following a number of planning meetings which investigated several candidate solutions. It was agreed that the combination of VMware and Dell EqualLogic offered the most technically and fiscally appropriate solution for Taylors of Harrogate’s present and future needs.
The VMware server environment includes three VMWare ESX servers and a Virtual Centre server, scaled to run the current application set in use at Taylors of Harrogate. This design enables Virtual Servers to be failed over for maintenance and Disaster Recovery.
The Dell EqualLogic shared storage solution consists of a two storage arrays with high resilience in the form of dual controllers and power supplies, and virtualised raid across 16 disks with a Dell EqualLogic Sumo deployed in a separate location for replication and archiving.
Migration of Taylors’ current server data was carried out over a number of weekends so as to avoid operational impact. Ongoing, the solution is supported twenty four hours a day, seven days a week by SICL.
RESULT
Easier management of Taylors’ server estate, with reduced space and power required. Additional virtual servers can be deployed quickly with minimal disruption or delay to everyday business.
“Taylors of Harrogate have worked with SICL from the design concept through to a successful completion of the project which has had minimal effect on the day to day business.”
Matthew Burden
IT Project Manager
Taylors of Harrogate